DirtyLAWndry reader, “Tonya”, wants to share what her boss has been up to lately.
“I’m emailing you because my boss is the worst attorney ever. Before I let you know why, I just want you to know that I don’t hold any grudges against lawyers or anything like that. I’m a paralegal and I’ve worked for the same firm for about seventeen years now. My boss has done tons of grimy things during that time. But, now, he’s suing his mother for defamation and wants the firm to represent him in the suit. We had a meeting about it and we thought he was just kidding. But, he’s really serious about this. His mother is probably in her late 80s maybe early 90s. Apparently, she hasn’t been feeling well lately. She lives by herself so her friends and family visit her more often than usual now. Well, she started telling stories of the things my boss used to do when he was younger (basically, what every mom does - bedwetting stories, tantrum recalls, etc) and this is what prompted my boss to sue her for defamation. It’s just ridiculous. I’m secretly praying that he gets disbarred for this one.”
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If you have a story you’d like to share with DirtyLAWndry, please email it to blog@dirtyLAWndry.com.
Also, if you’re a solo practitioner or entrepreneur, I’d love to feature you on the Entrepreneur page (http://entrepreneurs.dirtylawndry.com/) of this site. For more information about this opportunity please visit this Entrepreneur post.
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Lawyer accused of trying to smuggle drugs into jail
By Mari A. Schaefer
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
A Philadelphia lawyer was arrested Friday night and charged with trying to take heroin into the Delaware County jail.
Randall J. Sommovilla, 61, of the 900 block of South 11th Street, was charged with possession of contraband and drugs. He was released after posting bail.
Sommovilla was formerly with the Center City firm Ballard, Spahr, Andrews & Ingersoll.
According to court documents, he went to the jail Friday night after visiting hours to see Amber Knox, a client awaiting extradition to New Jersey. A spokesman for the Delaware County District Attorney’s Office did not know what charges Knox faces.
A routine ion scan, used to detect controlled substances, was performed on Sommovilla by a guard using a wand. It registered positive, according to court documents.
The guard repeated the scan, then discovered a plastic bag on the floor near Sommovilla’s feet, according to the documents. The bag contained small blue packages wrapped in a rubber band, along with pills.
The substance in the packages was heroin, and three glass pipes and cocaine were found in Sommovilla’s car, according to court documents.
Police said Sommovilla told them that “some girls he met” about three months ago had introduced him to drugs. According to police, he said that Knox had called him from the jail and said she was sick and needed drugs, and that another woman, Brittany, had asked him to take drugs to Knox.
Police said Sommovilla would not acknowledge possessing the drugs. He told police, “My suspicion is that Brittany placed the drugs in [my] clothing, and when I got out to the facility Amber would convince me to give her the drugs,” according to court documents.
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If you have a story you’d like to share with DirtyLAWndry, please email them to blog@dirtyLAWndry.com. Also, if you’re a solo practitioner or entrepreneur, I’d love to feature you on the Entrepreneur page (http://entrepreneurs.dirtylawndry.com/) of this site. For more information about this opportunity please visit the Entrepreneur page.
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Man jailed in divorce free after 14 yrs.
By WILLIAM BENDER
Philadelphia Daily News
H. Beatty Chadwick is either the most hardheaded lawyer in America or a poor sap who lost 14 years of his life to a money-grubbing ex-wife and cold-hearted judges.
Either way, at 3:08 p.m. yesterday the Main Line attorney who had been imprisoned since 1995 on a contempt charge walked out of the George W. Hill Correctional Facility a free man.
Chadwick, 73, who is believed to have set a U.S. record for time served in a civil-contempt case, was jailed during divorce proceedings for allegedly stashing $2.5 million in overseas accounts - out of the reach of his wife and her lawyers.
While fighting non-Hodgkins lymphoma in prison, he has steadfastly maintained that he lost the cash in a bad investment. Judges repeatedly denied his request to be freed, until yesterday, when Delaware County President Judge Joseph Cronin approved his release.
“He’s not bitter, he’s happy to be out,” said Chadwick’s attorney, Michael Malloy. “He’s a very low-key, even tempered guy.”
“I’ve never seen him lose his temper. I’ve never seem him upset.”
Chadwick’s plans were to go home to be with his son, Malloy said.
Many still believe that Chadwick - reportedly a control freak who would ration his spouse’s toilet-paper usage and designate specific times for sex - is a stubborn liar who still has the money.
“This guy is so off-the-wall that he’s never going to change his mind,” said Albert Momjian, attorney for Barbara Applegate, Chadwick’s ex-wife. “If he doesn’t have access to the money, how does he pay all these lawyers?”
About 35 prison staffers gathered yesterday - some crying and hugging Chadwick - to say goodbye to the “model inmate” who had worked in the law library and forged friendships with everyone from guards to senior administrators, said prison Superintendent John Reilly.
“He’s done more time than maybe the majority of people convicted of homicide do,” said Reilly, a former prosecutor. “What person in his right mind is going to flaunt the authority of the court and say, ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my life in jail?’ People just aren’t made that way.”
Yet, Reilly concedes, he and most other observers simply don’t know whether Chadwick is still hiding his fortune.
“To me, he’s an enigma,” he said. “I can’t get a read on the guy.” *
Associated Press contributed to this report
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If you have a story you’d like to share with DirtyLAWndry, please email them to blog@dirtyLAWndry.com. Also, if you’re a solo practitioner or entrepreneur, I’d love to feature you on the Entrepreneur page (http://entrepreneurs.dirtylawndry.com/) of this site. For more information about this opportunity please visit the Entrepreneur page.
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Lawyer pleads guilty in tax fraud
By SAM WOOD (Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer)
Published: July 6, 2009
A prominent Lehigh Valley attorney admitted in U.S. District Court today that he understated his income by $5 million, evading $1.9 million in taxes.
John Peter Karoly Jr, 59, had been scheduled to go to trial today for willfully filing false tax returns to the IRS.
In return for his guilty plea, the U.S. Attorney’s office dismissed charges that Karoly schemed to defraud the estate of his brother and sister-in-law by creating phony wills after the couple was killed in a plane crash.
Prosecutors also agreed to drop charges against Karoly’s son, J.P. Karoly III, and Dr. John J. Shane, for their alleged roles in creating the phony wills. In addition, Karoly agreed to renounce any interest he had in the 2006 wills and agreed to pay $1,955,395 to the IRS in restitution.
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If you have a story you’d like to share with DirtyLAWndry, please email them to blog@dirtyLAWndry.com. Also, if you’re a solo practitioner or entrepreneur, I’d love to feature you on the Entrepreneur page (http://entrepreneurs.dirtylawndry.com/) of this site. For more information about this opportunity please visit the Entrepreneur page.
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Dirty LAWndry reader, “Tiffany”, sent us a disturbing news article from the New York Times. She writes “this is the kind of BS that makes folks flip the hell out and seek revenge on innocent people in a murder rampage.” LOL!
Finding Debt a Bigger Hurdle Than Bar Exam
By JONATHAN D. GLATER (New York Times)
Published: July 1, 2009
All his life, Robert Bowman wanted to be a lawyer. He overcame a troubled childhood, a tragic accident that nearly cost him a leg and a debilitating Jet Ski collision.
He put himself through community college, worked and borrowed heavily to help pay for college, graduate school and even law school. He took the New York bar examination not once, not twice, not three times, but four, passing it last year. Finally, he seemed to be on his way.
In January, the committee of New York lawyers that reviews applications for admission to the bar interviewed=2 0Mr. Bowman, studied his history and the debt he had amassed, and called his persistence remarkable. It recommended his approval.
But a group of five state appellate judges decided this spring that his student loans were too big and his efforts to repay them too meager for him to be a lawyer. “Applicant has not made any substantial payments on the loans,” the judges wrote in a terse decision and an unusual rejection of the committee’s recommendation. “Applicant has not presently established the character and general fitness requisite for an attorney and counselor-at-law.”
Mr. Bowman, 47, appears to have crossed some unspoken line with his $400,000 in student debt and penalties, accumulated over many years. New York’s courts have overlooked misconduct like lawyers’ solicitation of minors for sex, efforts to deceive judges and possession of cocaine. Those instances have led merely to temporary uspensions from practice. “It usually takes a pretty significant record of some underlying misconduct to keep you out permanently,” said Deborah L. Rhode, a law professor at Stanford who has studied bar admissions across the states. Excluding someone for having too much debt was odd, she said; the hard questions about loans usually involve applicants who have used bankruptcy to try to escape loans, she said, and Mr. Bowman has not.
Mr. Bowman concedes that he has never made a payment on his loans, partly because of medical and other deferrals and problems with his lender. But he says he intends to make good, adding that his only hope is to begin practicing law — which means overturning the judges’ decision.
While thousands of indebted students have complained about their treatment by lenders, Mr. Bowman has documented his personal debt crisis with remarkable, obsessive intensity. He claims Sallie Mae overcharged him, imposing hefty and unjustified fees; did not allow him to defer payments when he was entitled to do so and improperly accounted for periods when he did defer.
According to his detailed records, a Sallie Mae representative even threatened him. “If you default, your license will be taken from you,” the representative said. “Do you understand that?” When Mr. Bowman said that he did not yet have a law license, the representative responded that the company would prevent him from getting one.
Martha Holler, a Sallie Mae spokeswoman, said that such threats would violate the company’s rules. “The size of this account is extremely unusual, but not surprising given that the customer took out 32 loans to pursue undergraduate, law and masters of law studies and has not made a single monthly payment over his 26-year student loan history,” Ms. Holler said. “We are performing an extensive review of his extraordinary case, and if we identify any errors we will quickly rectify them.”
Mr. Bowman has not had an easy time of it. He was shuffled through foster care and various legal proceedings as a child. He was impressed by the lawyers who represented his interests and saw a possible life’s work. Getting a college degree took 10 years because he had spent nearly six in rehabilitation, relearning how to walk after an all-terrain vehicle hit him while he was stopped on his motorcycle. The accident nearly cost him his left leg; he graduated from the State University of New York in Albany in 1995.
He enrolled at the University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco in 2000. After his third year, he began a masters of law program in London, where he lived with a girlfriend. He graduated in December 2004 with about $230,000 in student loan debt, and she helped support him while he studied, and studied again and again, for the bar exam.
In 2007, Mr. Bowman asked for an accounting of his loans, the payment deferrals he had used and his repayment options. He said he did not receive that information for nearly two years — a point disputed by Sallie Mae, which said it tried to reach Mr. Bowman several times in 2007.
Mr. Bowman passed the New York bar in February 2008. Soon after, while living with his once-estranged mother in Miramar, Fla., he was swimming at a beach when a Jet Ski lost control and slammed into him, breaking his good leg in four places.
“My luck on these things,” Mr. Bowman said. “So I contacted Sallie Mae and I’m like, I need a medical deferment and advice. Their response is, none available.” Sallie Mae transferred Mr. Bowman’s private student loans, the ones not guaranteed by the federal government, to a collection agency, which tacked on a 25 percent fee. That agency transferred the loan again, and he said the next collection agency tacked on another 25 percent fee. Sallie Mae denied this, saying he was charged the fee only once. But suddenly, Mr. Bowman found that he owed more than $400,000.
Knowing it would be difficult to explain his debt to New York’s Committee on Character and Fitness, which reviews applications for admission to the bar, Mr. Bowman gathered correspondence with Sallie Mae, loan statements, even the emergency room report on the Jet Ski incident.
The three lawyers who interviewed him in Albany in January found Mr. Bowman’s “determination to pursue a postsecondary education remarkable,” according to the written evaluation. As for the loans, they continued, “it appears unconscionable that a student loan indebtedness could go from $270,000 to $435,000 in four years.”
Two of the committee members did not return calls seeking comment; the third could not be reached.
In April the judges rejected the committee’s recommendation and ruled Mr. Bowman could not be a lawyer. Michael J. Novack, the clerk of the court that handled Mr. Bowman’s application, declined to comment specifically on his case.
“Generally speaking, if the committee on character and fitness recommends admission of an applicant, the court approves of it,” Mr. Novack said. “But not always.” Along with asking the court to reverse its decision, Mr. Bowman has consulted lawyers and is preparing a lawsuit against Sallie Mae. One way or another, he vows, he will make the switch from client to lawyer.
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What are your thoughts, Dirty LAWndry readers? If you have a story you’d like to share with DirtyLAWndry, please email them to blog@dirtyLAWndry.com. Also, if you’re a solo practitioner or entrepreneur, I’d love to feature you on this site. For more information about this opportunity please visit the Entrepreneur page.
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